The right to Privacy and why “I’ve got nothing to hide” is a terrible argument
Fifteen years ago, when Facebook was still a product people enjoyed, and new social media companies were sprouting up, we were all so excited to be apart of the ride. We’d been accumulating photos of our Frappuccino’s and videos of our butts while we squat at the gym with nowhere to post them until now.
We heard through the grapevine that Facebook and Google might be collecting a lot of information about us, but hey, the products were free, and a lot of fun, so what harm could a little invasion of privacy be? We collectively chose to ignore these invasions of privacy and accepted them as the cost of using the service. We also assumed the government would get involved soon enough and make sure companies aren’t being too intrusive, because as our governments would love for us to believe, they have our best interests at heart. Then in 2013, Snowden leaked information revealing massive scale government spying on its own citizens across the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, and more. So much for that theory.
As more and more people looked into these invasions of privacy, we learned that not only were companies and governments individually spying on us, but companies and governments were working together to spy on us. For example, the US government colluded with many tech and hardware companies to build in backdoors into their products that gave them unfettered access to spy on us via the products and services we use.
Amazingly, despite these revelations, many people still seemed unconcerned, and a frequently heard response to the invasion of privacy was “I have nothing to hide.”
Let’s discuss why this rationalization is absurd.
First, are we sure we’ve got nothing to hide? Do we have a sense of what the parties collecting data on us are doing with that data? What if the government made drinking a gallon of chocolate milk while sitting on your couch and watching Mexican soap opera’s illegal? Literally half of the population would be arrested due to the governments ability to spy on us while we engage in our guilty pleasures.
Secondly, privacy is a human right. Snowden said that saying you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Why would we allow our rights to be stripped away simply because we aren’t exercising them at the moment?
Third. Psychologist Abraham Maslow has a famous quote that says, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Similarly, a government agency who is spying to look for criminals is primed to look for patterns of criminality. If someone is programmed to spot criminality, they won’t see you when they spy on you, they will see a criminal. Eventually you will do something that confirms their suspicion of your criminality, it’s only a matter of time. Our laws have become so broad in scope, chances are most of us are doing something every day that is illegal. There is actually a book written about this called Three Felonies a Day where the author predicts that the average American citizen unknowingly commits three felonies a day that a watchful eye could pin on them.
In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.
The fourth point is more philosophical. If we truly don’t have anything to hide, then why is surveillance necessary in the first place? Clearly companies and governments believe there is something hiding within us that is worth parsing out with surveillance. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on targeted advertising certainly agree.
My fifth and last point is that knowing we are being watched changes our behaviour. Without privacy, many of us would feel pressure to conform to what we think are societal norms. We’d be afraid to express our views in full, discuss and wrestle with controversial issues, or seek understanding for fear of being misunderstood.
In an increasingly technological world, the threat of mass surveillance will only increase, and we should be very careful that we don’t lose our ability to exist privately. Under a watchful eye we will stifle much of ourselves and the ripple effects on our psychologies, politics, relationships, and economies will be severe.